This guidance was produced for The Archives and Records Association by Activist Group.

The authors of the guidance are: Eric Bohl Andrew Holden

Working in partnership with:

© Crown copyright 2015

Front cover image: Tug of War team, 1939-1946. Catalogue reference Central Office of Information, INF 3/125b

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# Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1\
Introduction to the toolkit .................................................................................................. 2\
Section 1 - Identifying and prioritising your stakeholders .............................................. 3\
1.1 Your mission and strategic plan ................................................................................. 4\
1.2 The organisational planning cycle ........................................................................... 4\
Figure 1.1 – A generic planning cycle ........................................................................... 4\
1.3 Stakeholder mapping ................................................................................................. 5\
Figure 1.2 - example stakeholder map for an archive .................................................... 7\
1.4 Mission and planning - checklist: ............................................................................. 7\
Case study 1 – Building a Partnership for Building .......................................................... 8\
Section 2 – Getting your story right .................................................................................. 9\
2.1 Talk the language of decision makers and funders .................................................. 10\
2.2 Speaking the language of outcomes ......................................................................... 10\
2.3 The power of story-telling ....................................................................................... 10\
2.4 Data and evidence ..................................................................................................... 11\
2.5 The financial story .................................................................................................... 11\
2.6 Getting your story right - checklist: ......................................................................... 12\
Section 3 - Generating active support in your community .............................................. 13\
3.1 Giving supporters practical tasks not just a lecture ............................................... 14\
Case study 2: British Postal Museum and Archive ......................................................... 15\
3.2 Working with volunteers ........................................................................................... 16\
Case study 3: Gloucestershire Archives – When Volunteers Take a Lead .................... 17\
3.3 Working with businesses .......................................................................................... 18\
Case study 4: LMA - Working with businesses - Standard Chartered Bank. A depositor\
who became a funder ....................................................................................................... 19\
3.4 The voluntary sector .................................................................................................. 20\
3.5 Higher education ....................................................................................................... 20\
Case study 5: East Sussex Archive - Engaging academics beyond History .................. 22\
3.6 Thinking beyond your area - national and international audiences ....................... 23\
3.7 Generating active support – checklist: ..................................................................... 24\
Section 4 - Where to go for help ....................................................................................... 25\
4.1 Where to go for help ................................................................................................... 26 Introduction Introduction to the toolkit

If you're going to be serious about fundraising as an archive, you can't go it alone. But developing relationships which lead to funding often takes considerable time and needs strategic planning.

You need to get out there and build a coalition of supporters - not easy for a service and sector that tend to have a low profile. The most successful fundraisers - and services - are those who:

- have a strong internal network, knowing who to draw on for advice, support and resources
- create an external family of partners, user communities, volunteers and supporters
- know how to draw on and harness the efforts of the 'great and the good'.

This toolkit will guide you through some of the key steps you need to think about to gain a clear view of how to prioritise your relationship building with Stakeholders, how to have better conversations with potential supporters, and how to sustain those relationships which may lead to funding opportunities.

It should enable you to:

- assess more precisely how to influence external networks
- understand better how to cultivate support from a range of user, volunteer, and community constituencies.
- have greater confidence about raising the visibility of your service both with internal audiences and senior colleagues to leverage external support.

The toolkit is designed to provide an easy-to-use overview of the main issues to address. It includes:

- simple checklists to get you started
- links to useful materials
- case studies from archive services.

Structure Summary

a. Identifying and Prioritising your stakeholders b. Getting your Story Right c. Generating Active Support in your Community d. Where to go for help Chapter 1 - Identifying and prioritising your stakeholders 1.1 Your mission and strategic plan

Being clear about your archive service’s mission, and priorities within your strategic plan, will give you a fixed location from which to assess the stakeholders you need to engage and influence.

In a world where public funding, charitable trusts, corporate sponsors, and even individual donors, increasingly focus on the outcomes of their investment, this may mean asking whether your existing mission is articulated in a way which addresses local needs as well as the delivery of core services.

The process of stakeholder engagement will give you opportunities to review and adjust your plan to help deliver their priorities.

For example, do you clearly articulate the benefits of your activities to People as well as custodianship of your Collections?

1.2 The organisational planning cycle

A generic planning cycle will involve four key stages. These can be expressed using different terminology, but one simple structure is the one used widely in the corporate sector as well as public sector Commissioning:

**Figure 1.1 – A generic planning cycle**

| Phase | Key Activities | |-------|----------------| | Analyse | The analysis of need, of capacity, assets and resources and market research. Agreeing priority needs with partners. Defining the outcomes to meet those needs. | | Plan | Gap analysis, stakeholder engagement, the design of services and service pathways, developing a business strategy. | | Do | Implementing your operational plan, delivering to users. | | Review | Performance monitoring and reviewing the effectiveness of the strategy. Reviewing and learning from delivery and feedback from users. |

*Source: Adapted from When The Salami’s Gone (SOLACE guide to commissioning and sourcing, 2012)*

You should ensure you have a sense of what disciplines will be useful to you in your planning at different stages to identify and prioritise key stakeholders. The level of detail you will need to develop will depend on a number of factors including access to reliable data and the depth of your current relationships, the size of your business, and the complexity of the environment in which you are operating. Updating these on a regularly basis during your planning cycle will provide you with an evidence base to support your business case, and enable you to review your progress.

**Market research**

You probably have a very clear picture of other archive and heritage providers in your geographic or subject area, but from a customer perspective, or using an outcomes framework, you may find you are competing with a much broader range of cultural and community providers. You will also begin to understand what customer groups you might be able to attract in the future if you address existing barriers to engagement.

**Stakeholder analysis and mapping** A systematic understanding of who your key internal and external stakeholders are will also support your analysis and planning phases. There are a number of different approaches you can take, and below we suggest one method of Stakeholder Mapping. The benefits of taking this approach are that you can look at different groups in a consistent and comparable way, it can be highly collaborative and participatory, both within your team, with others in your organisation, and with external partners. Its results will also support your evaluation of your progress.

**Audience segmentation** A common approach to thinking about your audiences and how to engage more people in using your services is through ‘Audience Segmentation’. This system categorises people on the basis of shared motivations or social preferences, rather than more traditional demographic characteristics which may miss the real reason why people might use a service. Your audience development strategy should involve some form of segmentation, and the principles and learning from this are also useful in thinking about engaging Stakeholder groups and organisations.

**Marketing and communications activity** Your market research and stakeholder analysis will have given you a much clearer picture of your opportunities and the motivation and priorities of your existing and potential customers and stakeholder groups. This will help you plan your marketing and communications activity according to their needs, including their preferred methods of communication, any access barriers they may have, or the language you need to use to tailor your messages to their agenda.

**Customer Relationship Management** Customer Relationship Management, often referred to as CRM, is a sales and marketing approach to managing your relationships with your customers which is very useful for engaging with a broad range of stakeholders and different types of relationship, including users, strategic partners, funders and donors. On a grand scale it will involve the use of technology and software to collect and analyse data and tailor communication. Archive services may already have access to corporate systems for communicating with users. More broadly, you should consider collecting data on your engagement with wider stakeholders. This will help you share the load with colleagues, volunteers and supporters, track multiple conversations, and review your progress in developing your relationships.

### 1.3 Stakeholder mapping

You will probably have encountered a variety of approaches to stakeholder mapping, calibrating how you engage with different groups and develop relationships according to different criteria. Whichever ones you decide to use you should try and ensure that the process is:

- **Collaborative** Ideally, this is a team activity as everyone's experience and relationships will be crucial, as they will all be involved in taking forward the outcome. Even if you are a staff team of one, you should take this opportunity to involve colleagues, volunteers and external partners who can challenge assumptions and will often spot valuable relationships you've taken for granted. It's also an opportunity to influence them and show them how you are delivering to a wide set of agendas.

- **Proportionate** Don't try and analyse the world in minute detail. You don't have time and people will lose interest. Start with some broad, high level criteria, and consider keeping a log of further questions as they arise during the process which you may want to look in more detail later.

- **Iterative** A one-off exercise may give you some basic pointers but without analysing the information collated and reviewing it as your knowledge changes and the world moves around you, the data will stagnate and repeating it will feel laborious.

**How to map them** Because we're looking at how stakeholder mapping can help you develop your networks and supporters with a view to securing your funding strategy, you might start a mapping exercise by plotting internal and external stakeholders on an axis denoting:

- the current strength of your relationship from unaware to fully engaged
- their influence over your funding strategy from low to high.

This basic map will give you a picture of which individuals and organisations you should prioritise, with a view to shifting resources to those with most influence, and moving them into the 'engaged' quadrant.

You could also apply principles you've learned from Audience Segmentation to think about how your stakeholders can help you engage more users with particular characteristics. A basic audience segmentation system might divide people according to their motivation to engage, for example:

- Social
- Active
- Informed
- Busy

By identifying the types of services and individual organisations who are best at engaging these groups, you can target which of these might be the most important potential partners for you.

You can also overlay additional characteristics which will help you determine who in your team should 'hold' that relationship and how much energy to invest in it, for example you might look at the stakeholder's relevant skills and capacity, or their openness to partnership working. You should also consider the project from their perspective, how much do they have invested in the outcome, and how might that impact on their ability or willingness to contribute to its development.

How you engage with each group is crucial. It’s important to remember that for some groups, more than one method of engagement might be appropriate, and it may change over time. You therefore need to keep your engagement strategy under review.

From a basic map of your stakeholders, you can develop a more sophisticated engagement strategy based on the type of relationship you need to have with each group, and how you want each group to feel about your project as a result.

**Figure 1.2 - example stakeholder map for an archive**

| Consulting | Co-creating | |------------|-------------| | Based on pre-determined ideas | Working with an open agenda | | Inviting feedback | Workshops and planning events | | Using a variety of channels for dialogue | Generating and debating ideas using a variety of platforms | | People feel **involved** | People feel **ownership** |

| Informing | Influencing | |-----------|-------------| | One-way communication | Marketing approach | | Providing news and information | Encouraging behaviour change | | Delivered as and when necessary | Selling and telling | | People are **aware** | More tailored communication | | | People **buy-in** |

**1.4 Mission and planning - checklist:**

- Review your service’s mission to ensure it is meaningful to key stakeholders
- Review your organisational planning cycle to include key steps in understanding audiences and stakeholders
- Involve your team, colleagues, volunteers, users and partners in a Stakeholder Mapping Process

**Further Reading**

NESTA Heritage and Culture Open Data and Stakeholder Research Case study 1 – Building a Partnership for Building

Summary

Plymouth and West Devon Record Office has built a successful and diverse partnership to lead an ambitious new capital project for heritage in the South West.

Scope

Plymouth and West Devon Record Office faced an historic need for better accommodation to continue to meet TNA requirements for places of deposit. Previous capital project hadn’t managed to get off the ground, but despite this, the archive has formed a strong new partnership to build a £21m History Centre for the city supported by a £12m HLF grant. A reorganisation placing the archive within Economic Development and clear political leadership in 2012 provided some of the renewed impetus for change. Looking forward the Mayflower 2020 anniversary gave a visionary milestone to rally regional support for a shared future for a range of heritage partners.

What’s unique

Louisa Blight, Head of Collections at Plymouth City Council highlights three key challenges the partnership is meeting: First is the political challenge of unprecedented levels of scrutiny for the archive and reputational significance for the Council, which is magnified by the importance which their main funder, HLF, attaches to the project.

Secondly, developing the partnership itself is a governance and cultural challenge - not only does the project involve integration of archive and museum collections within the council, but also the independent, charitable organisations, South West Film and Television Archive and the South West Image Bank.

Thirdly, the local heritage community and users of the archive had shared with staff at the Council previous disappointments about potential capital projects and were understandably apprehensive about this new initiative. Louisa says: "We had to turn local pressure into enthusiasm and advocacy for the project."

Results

Although the new Centre is planned to open in 2018, the patient, incremental approach being taken to integrating such a diverse group of partners is paying dividends. The Council convened a Heritage Consortium Group which gave people a stake in the project while also planning other positive activities like a Heritage Festival. Unusually, the group was involved in presentations to HLF, which got excellent feedback from the funder.

Key learning points

Louisa says "The relationship with your funder is key. You need to invest time in building that relationship building to generate confidence that they're getting value for money and that you can deliver. With a long-term capital project like this, the partnership building is a process and a journey. The partnership may look very different when our building opens. You need to be relaxed about that."

For further information

http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/historycentre Chapter 2 – Getting your story right 2.1 Talk the language of decision makers and funders

Having analysed the drivers of key stakeholder groups you can start to bridge the language gap which often exists between subject specialists and strategic decision-makers.

The archive and wider heritage sector is brilliant at conveying passion about its collections, historic buildings and the history of local communities. It is also excellent at responding to the needs of core users who have a similar passion for genealogy and local history or academic research.

But in a world of shrinking resources, much of this may mean little to decision makers grappling with, in a local government context, what’s known as ‘The Graph of Doom’, which predicts the shrinking of resources available to local authorities beyond the allocation of resources between Adult Social Care, Public Health and Safeguarding. Equally, (and not unrelated to the public sector funding context) charitable funders are facing increasing demands on their funds. We are all familiar with this narrative from the mainstream media.

Archive services suffer from the additional barrier that they are small and often lack visibility from decision makers, or are not represented directly on key community forums.

2.2 Speaking the language of outcomes

All services are now competing to demonstrate their impact on key priorities and outcomes.

The ‘Fundraising for Archives ‘Commissioning for Archives’ module outlines key outcomes frameworks and the synergies with archive services which you can exploit.

Additionally, it’s useful to remember that ‘outcomes-thinking’, and the need to demonstrate impact of investment in more detail, is now prevalent among many charitable funders and even corporate sponsors. Charitable Foundations may also provide support to organisations wanting to develop their capacity and ability to measure their impact, which would help with accessing funding from other funders including public sector commissioners.

2.3 The power of story-telling

The heritage sector has become much more user-focused in the way it harnesses the power of stories to communicate complex information about objects or complex historical change - think the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects. The influence of this paradigm has spilled out into the mainstream.

It’s a useful approach to take when thinking about the right language to engage key decision makers and funders. You could think about composing a short story for each group or organisation which articulates their position and objectives. Also, start to articulate your own impact in a narrative form which will engage and inspire, but also be relevant and intelligible to the groups you are trying to influence.

2.4 Data and evidence

‘The plural of anecdote is not data’. However pithily or eloquently honed your narrative, if you lack robust evidence, your impact will still sound hollow to those whose normal currency is peer reviewed data.

You should be aware of the risk of straying from talking about impact into advocating for your service. Equally, being honest about gaps in your evidence, or understanding that evidence of what hasn’t worked, can be as valuable as what has gone right.

However, just relying on talking about the numbers of visitors you receive or hits on your website will probably see eyes glaze over, unless it can be linked to demonstrating a wider benefit or return on investment, for example accessing hard-to-reach groups or providing facilities for other activities.

In the words of one public sector Commissioner: ‘Setting out only to prove what is successful is not evaluation. Some things don’t work out but it can be difficult for organisations in receipt of public funds to say that.’

This doesn’t mean you will be expected to have the same level of evidence as clinical approaches or even of sport’s contribution to health. You do, though, need to demonstrate that you understand different sources of research and types of evidence, and be able to express your impact in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

Collecting and analysing data and evidence can be part of your engagement strategy for developing better networks. Pooling information and data sources, and surveying people in your networks can be powerful tools to enhance your capacity and share ownership of the evidence base.

2.5 The financial story

Within all fundraising contexts, being able to articulate a ‘Financial Story’ of value for money, and a return on investment, is increasingly imperative.

It is worth thinking about being able to express your service’s value in terms of ‘The 3 Es’:

- Economy: minimising the cost of resources used or required (inputs) – spending less;
- Efficiency: the relationship between the output from goods or services and the resources to produce them – spending well; and
- Effectiveness: the relationship between the intended and actual results of public spending (outcomes). Further Reading

National Audit Office guidance on ‘Assessing Value for Money’:

http://www.nao.org.uk/successful-commissioning/general-principles/value-for-money/assessing-value-for-money

2.6 Getting your story right - checklist:

- Review how you use language, think more outcomes and less archives
- Construct some stories to express the impact of your work on outcomes
- Consider how you might use research and evidence better
- Talk to key internal stakeholders to understand their own external networks

Further Reading

Research and Evidence Tools:

CASE Programme Resources and Tools

Return to the top Chapter 3 - Generating active support in your community 3.1 Giving supporters practical tasks not just a lecture

One of the key principles which underpins this toolkit is the need to move beyond 'advocating' for your service, to building a network of supporters united in harnessing your assets to achieve common outcomes.

It also recognises that looking simply for passive support from people in agreeing with the importance of your archive represents a poor return on the investment of resources it will take to engage people.

This means that actions really do speak louder than words. Look for ways in which you can give supporters and stakeholders active tasks and targets which will motivate them and achieve shared aims.

For example, for parliamentarians, their stock-in-trade is asking Questions to Ministers and holding debates about local issues. This gives them valuable profile and enhances their credentials for supporting their local community. Archive services have rich resources available to support politicians in drafting copy about a whole range of services and aspects of their local history.

This section, for archives in different governance settings, looks at the ways you might engage people in different parts of the public, commercial and voluntary worlds, both to design and deliver services, and as networks of supporters who will help lead you to future funding opportunities. Case study 2: British Postal Museum and Archive

Summary

The British Postal Museum and Archive and its focused approach to working with politicians to deliver a successful advocacy campaign.

Details

BPMA is an independent charity spun out from Royal Mail in 2004.

One of the charity's principal aims was always to achieve new home for museum and archive following closure of previous postal museum. When the Government announced the privatisation of Royal Mail, there was a need to raise the profile of the charity and manage future risks to the heritage.

BPMA had to make sure that the heritage wasn't forgotten, and the campaign took the opportunity to give effect to that. Its protection is now enshrined in statute.

According to Adrian Steel, Director, ‘People think, 'let's have a conversation with an MP' but all too easily it gets dropped which is a waste of time. We have a regular programme of engagement.'

BPMA worked successfully with politicians from all parties by focusing on identifying with their passion for heritage. Adrian recalls that local MP, Emily Thornberry, had been for a visit. 'Her passion for the heritage led her to stage an adjournment debate which had a tangible impact on our profile.'

'A lot of sector advocacy is asking politicians to do things they can't do, like secure funding. Give them things they can do first, like write letters or stage debates aimed at raising awareness.'

But Adrian says you should remember that support from politicians and 'celebrity' patrons or ambassadors can be directly influential with funders.

Harry Huskisson, Communications Manager, insists: 'It's not about a big expensive campaign. There are lots of opportunities for archive profile-raising in the media and these can be converted into political engagement. We don't have expensive systems like a media database.'

Measuring your impact in this area is quite hard. Adrian observes that ‘the number of politicians on our Christmas card list has gone up significantly, and we're writing more personal messages in them, which shows our relationships are blossoming.'

Lessons

Adrian Steel: ‘Continuity is key - build relationships over time and plan for changes in individuals.'

Harry Huskisson: ‘Give people practical tasks to complete to build momentum.' 3.2 Working with volunteers

Having a clear volunteering strategy Archive services have usually made best use of volunteers to support collections management tasks. As you develop a more strategic external view of how your service is contributing to a range of outcomes, you will be able to articulate benefits of working with volunteers in a range of areas which will enable you to extend your reach, particularly when operating on a small staff team.

Having a diverse volunteer profile which begins to mirror your local population, is one of the best ways to demonstrate your service is delivering a valuable service.

Recognising the power of the volunteer perspective and the breadth of professional and community roles they may bring will also hugely extend your network of champions who can speak personally about the value of the archive service.

By developing a strategy for volunteering you will be able to demonstrate a clearer framework of individual benefits for volunteers, access external support for management and training, and express the value of your volunteering to community outcomes.

Making use of the evidence of volunteering There are many resources to help you master the challenges of resourcing the management and development of volunteers which are not negligible. More relevant to the question of developing networks and supporters is understanding the need to collect data and evidence through performance management about your volunteering programme, and collecting the perspective of volunteers to use in communicating with key stakeholders.

Developing role descriptions Think about how you can develop role descriptions which will express the need for people with experience and skills of community engagement, IT, research and fundraising.

Resource London Councils ‘Love Libraries’ Volunteering Toolkit http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/policylobbying/culturetourismand2012/artsculture/resources/lovelibrariesvolunteering.htm Case study 3: Gloucestershire Archives – When Volunteers Take a Lead

Summary

Gloucestershire Archives has built a powerful network of volunteers who play a leading role in developing the service.

Details

Gloucestershire Archives, which delivers an archive service for Gloucestershire County Council and South Gloucestershire Council, has created an extensive network of over 100 volunteers who collectively donate nearly 18,000 hours of their time each year.

‘We wanted a different approach to working with volunteers’, reports Head of Information Management & Archives, Heather Forbes. Rather than give volunteers ‘the menial stuff’, says Forbes, they are supported to take on a leadership role. Volunteers take on a range of projects, including project managing and cataloguing (under the supervision of an archivist).

One example is the Gloucester Rugby Club heritage project where a friends organisation secured funds from HLF to deliver a project which was entirely led by volunteers. ‘What they produced was stunning’, says Forbes.

Gloucestershire Archives staff work closely with volunteers with one staff member taking the lead on recruiting volunteers. This can include using a volunteer agency; canvassing in more deprived areas; and targeting the recruitment of volunteer fund-raisers. In future, as resources become more constrained, it is expected that volunteers will become increasingly self-reliant.

Lessons

Heather Forbes stresses the need for careful joint planning with your volunteers:

- ‘It's a virtuous circle. There needs to be a shared vision with your volunteers and it needs to be two-way.’
- ‘Sustainability is key to our approach: how can the benefit continue after the project is over?’ 3.3 Working with businesses

Developing relationships with businesses is often thought of as merely chasing dwindling sponsorship opportunities with companies which have little interest in the value or process of a cultural institution. In reality the range of opportunities which businesses offer are diverse, and offer benefits beyond box-ticking for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or cash or in-kind donations.

Archive services can offer a range of services to businesses which can enhance their brand value and extend the profile of your archive at the same time. For example, using historic material about local businesses, the labour force and streetscape to develop new products and marketing.

You should develop a clear picture of what proportion of your current users are from local businesses, and speak to colleagues and partners to find out which are using closely related services like business support units and public libraries.

Assess the opportunities to offer your facilities to businesses for training, meetings and events, with the added value over commercial providers that your collections and community status will give you.

Using their skills and contacts Business people are creative people who have skills and experience which can help you develop your service. They are, by their nature, well networked locally and have a status with key decision-makers which can enhance messages about your impact if expressed from their own perspective. Ensure that business people and their employees are targeted as potential volunteers.

From depositors to partners and funders Archives with existing business depositors should explore developing an ongoing relationship with the company and its staff as these relationships are most likely to lead to future partnership and funding opportunities. Case study 4: LMA - Working with businesses - Standard Chartered Bank. A depositor who became a funder.

Summary

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) developed a relationship with Standard Chartered Bank which led to two and a half year funding.

Details

Unsurprisingly, as part of the City of London Corporation, LMA receives many deposit requests from businesses based in the City or pan-London area, offering high quality material. LMA has increasingly taken a strategic approach to engaging and working with business depositors.

According to Richard Wiltshire, Senior Archivist for Business Archives, this is partly out of necessity in the current funding climate, but also recognises the greater value that can accrue to both LMA and its users, as well as for the business itself in terms of branding, marketing and communications.

Richard says that corporate interest in heritage tends to be cyclical and linked to business performance. ‘Standard Chartered Bank had gone through big changes but in 2009/2010 they were commissioning a history to be written for their anniversary. They offered to deposit more material and provided an endowment.’

‘Our short proposal led to a partnership agreement which funded the equivalent of three archivists for two and a half years to work on over 330 linear shelf metres of records, as well as an additional project to digitise all the photographic images in the collection to support the new book.’

‘Later, one of the Bank's facilities managers who was interested in history arranged a meeting for staff association and pensioners, and we did a temporary loan of items back.’

Richard points to several advantages to working with a corporate partner. ‘They can sometimes be a lot less effort than making standard funding applications for collections. They trust you as the professionals’. Though he warns, ‘it might more difficult if a business wanted to micro-manage the process and risks’.

He advises that you need to understand how the business is structured and who to go to about the archive and funding. ‘It might be Marketing, Secretariat or Legal rather than the person responsible for the archive.’

We’re getting a lot of general researchers using the collection who are loving it.’

Lessons

- Richard suggests you can ‘think about using anniversaries to target and build relationships with businesses’.
- ‘Look for other opportunities within the business and additional activities you can offer them’. 3.4 The voluntary sector

Archives will be mostly be familiar with their local Civic and Amenity Societies which focus on the built environment, local history and heritage, and may already be advocating in support of, or fundraising for, the benefit of archives. If you are looking to engage new audiences or significantly shift the design and operational model of your service, be sure to understand any concerns which these groups may have, and include their perspectives in your planning and analysis.

You should also consider, as part of your stakeholder analysis and audience development plan, whether the groups that are easiest to engage, are representative of your local population. Make sure you go beyond those most willing and knowledgeable, particularly if you are trying to reflect a more diverse local population.

Whether or not your archive service is a charity itself, it is equally important to be clear about the structure of the broader voluntary sector in your local area. You should understand how to use it to engage particular groups in your community, how it works with local government, other public agencies and accesses funding, as well as the agencies which offer support and capacity building within the sector, like your local Community and Voluntary Service (CVS), which should support voluntary archive and heritage organisations in your area.

Partnership opportunities Working with archives between different sectors including charities, is an important means of broadening the range of funders with whom you might engage.

Recruitment of supporters The voluntary sector is full of talented and skilled professional people who may share your values, and it is important to view its potential from this perspective initially, rather than as an existing pool of ‘volunteers’. Given that, the voluntary sector is expert in working with volunteers and can help you develop and market your services and share opportunities volunteering opportunities.

3.5 Higher education

Spreading your influence in higher education For those archives outside the HE sector, it’s worth remembering the words of one former academic working in public health: ‘most academics are friendly and some are even house-trained.’ Archivists in the HE sector may even agree with either or both of these sentiments.

Archive services probably engage with higher education better than most sectors. A significant proportion of your service users will be undergraduate and postgraduate students and professional researchers. You can still extend your research reach by thinking about the profile of your community of academic researchers against the wider research community in public sector bodies and universities locally. Think beyond history and heritage, and how you can engage with scientists or public policy academics for instance through themes within your collections.

**Working with postgraduate students** Postgraduate students are a valuable resource as potential experts in your collection, volunteers and or trainees, and as bridges to a wider research community. They are often on the hunt for fruitful topics of research so understanding how the structure of postgraduate research work will help you tailor your services and support to engage the best students.

**Evaluating your services** Section 3 introduced to you some of the challenges of demonstrating your impact on the strategic outcomes which funders are looking for. Working with higher education partners, whether through postgraduate students or researchers in a range of academic departments, can be the best means of harnessing professional research skills which a small archive service may struggle to replicate.

This should be a mutually beneficial and collaborative process in which academic practice and methodology is stretched by working with your archive service, as well as delivering valuable evidence about your impact.

**Accessing HE funding streams** Building these relationships with higher education partners will give you a powerful route to future funding streams like the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Case study 5: East Sussex Archive - Engaging academics beyond history

Summary

East Sussex County Record Office is now engaging a far wider range of academics than historians.

Details

Moving to a shared service with the University of Brighton at The Keep has meant that ESCRO has taken the opportunity to look beyond the local archive's traditional academic user groups.

Elizabeth Hughes says 'Our traditional audience is family historians and local community as you'd expect. Obviously our new building and sharing collections has been a major driver for change, but this is something any archive can begin to think about.'

We're now engaging with researchers from Domestic Science and Physics departments, Geography, Physics, Citizenship and Archaeology, as well as the Medical School.

They are now rubbing up against our traditional users and crossing over, which is very exciting.

Students didn't particularly use ESCC before so that's also been a great benefit.

ESCRO holds a wide range of records to support researchers in health and medicine because we hold hospital records and public health. Now there are events for Heads of Schools from the University at the Keep to look at collections.

Lessons

Elizabeth Hughes says 'you need to think outside your comfort zone, assess the strengths of your collections and start knocking on some doors to start some conversations.' 3.6 Thinking beyond your area - national and international audiences

The exponential growth in genealogy and online historical research methodologies has expanded the opportunities for even very small local archives to reach national and international audiences.

With a good understanding of your collections, data about your customers and awareness of trends in research, you can assess whether targeting support to particular groups of potential supporters beyond your local area could become a useful tool in your armoury. This might be an emigrant community for which your area still exerts a significant pull, or be taking advantage of the global profile of local heritage assets or historical figures.

By building a relationship with such groups, you can begin to ask them for more information about their motivation and potential willingness to support you as a champion or donate money. 3.7 Generating active support – checklist:

- Identify a list of practical actions for your supporters to carry out to help you
- Find out if you are already connecting with key stakeholders through your users
- Review your use of volunteers and identify strategic opportunities from their networks
- Talk to local businesses to find out what makes them tick
- Talk to academics beyond the history department
- Plan how to work with an HE partner to improve your evaluation and research data
- Assess whether you can stimulate interest from a community of interest abroad

Further Reading

Williams, C. (2014) Managing Volunteering in Archives: Report. Taunton: Archives and Records Association

The National Archives and Research Libraries UK, Guide to Collaboration between the Archive and Higher Education sectors

NCVO Practical Support for charities and working with the voluntary sector Chapter 4 - Where to go for help

## 4.1 Where to go for help

| | | |---|---| | 1. | Audience Segmentation. *The National Archives Resources on Audience Development.* | | 2. | Fundraising for Archives. *Commissioning for Archives.* | | 3. | Fundraising for Archives. *Advocacy and Developing a Case for Support.* | | 4. | Fundraising for Archives. *Financial Planning.* |

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